“I just realized what day this is,” my partner, Michael, called out the other day, when I was doing something in the den and he was sitting in a chair in the living room with his laptop on his lap. I couldn’t exactly hear what he was saying, so I went into the living room, stood beside him, and asked him what he was talking about.
“It’s an important anniversary,” he said.
And then he told me that it was exactly one year ago minus one day that he had that scan. I knew right away what scan he was referring to: It was that routine scan of his shoulder and upper chest, in a sports medicine office, which he got because he told his GP he was having some shoulder pain and the doctor said, “Well, why don’t you get your shoulder looked at that sports medicine place since your insurance will cover it?” And Michael did that, and the radiologist who looked at the results of the scan said he thought he saw something suspicious on it. The doctor at the sports medicine place didn’t see what the radiologist saw, but Michael’s general practitioner said it probably merited a bit more investigation. So a different CT was ordered, and that showed up what turned out to be a tumor, which turned out to be cancer, which resulted in many appointments and chemotherapy infusions and surgery and more immunotherapy infusions and follow-up appointments.
And now it’s been a year since that initial sports medicine appointment. The cancer was found early, and it seems safe to say that the medical treatment worked. The immunotherapy infusions are ongoing, but Michael seems fine, his doctors think he’s fine, and the CT scans are clear.
From the start, it seemed like a miracle that the cancer was found the way it was—that Michael just happened to tell his doctor he was having shoulder pain (the shoulder pain was unrelated to the tumor and went away shortly after the initial appointment), that his doctor suggested he go to the sports medicine clinic, that the radiologist at the sports medicine clinic noticed that anomaly on the scan results and let Michael know. It seemed like too many coincidences to be anything other than a miracle. Even Michael, who doesn’t generally believe in miracles, could see that.
And now it’s a year later, as I’m standing here in the living room next to Michael, who’s sitting down with his laptop on his lap, and it seems like even more of a miracle—the fact that we got through all that and came out on the other side of it.
The sun is out, and the room is bright and warm, although it’s bitterly cold outside and the weather is even worse in many other places—handing out a foot or more of snow and bitter cold and disastrous ice in cities that aren’t used to dealing with weather like that. It’s hard not to worry about the people who live there, hard not to worry about all the bad things that are going on in the world and all the things that could go wrong in the future, about whether Michael’s cancer will come back or some other disaster will present itself to me or him or us that we might not have a miraculous warning about.
But right now, today, Michael is fine and I am fine and we made it through that hard year—he made it through that year—and we came out the other end. Life moves on, I think, and sometimes it doesn’t get worse, it gets better.
Once again, I feel the miracle of it. I feel it even more deeply. The miracle doesn’t seem so much like it’s about finding the cancer early through a series of coincidences—yes, it is about that. But right now it seems like it’s also about the pleasure of this moment, the pleasure of getting to have the experience of ordinary life. Ordinary life itself seems like the miracle. The fact that miracles exist at all seems like the miracle.